Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2011 11:51 amPosts: 6025Location: United States of New England

anyone here have any experience with a med called Trazodone for their dog?

it's branded for seperation anxiety (like all anti depressants for dogs seem to be) but my uber-reactive dog is starting it in conjunction with clomipramine because the clomipramine just wasnt cutting it anymore.''

also!!! today i learned that (at least at CVS) you can get a AAA discount on pet meds or meds that your insurance wont cover (for people obvs) i was worried we were gonna be laying down another $70 for a new med (thats how much the clomipramine cost us the first time we filled it there) and we ended up paying only 10 bucks!! it was $20 something then the AAA discount brought it down to $10. i literally did a happy dance as we were leaving.she said every med has a different percentage off so not all of them would be that high of a discount but this was a first time i had ever gotten ANY sort of discount on any health care stuff for my pets!!!

All I know about trazodone is that it can also act as a sedative, so don't be surprised if pooch seems sleepy. I think it can also cause some dry mouth but not as bad as some other meds and I don't think it's bad in terms of side effects for the most part.

It's really great that you can get your meds at cvs, that's awesome. Be careful getting pet meds at a typical pharmacy, some cross between humans and other pets pretty simply, while for some dosage specs are trickier to do for animals because of suspension or other mixing requirements. But a good vet should be able to give you a heads up about that ahead of time and tell you what to double check at the pharmacy.

Eta: Sorry for the little med rant at the end there. I've heard from a few people about getting meds at human pharmacies that were dosed scarily wrong so I get a but preachy about it. You're probably just giving this as a standard dosed pill so I added all that unnecessarily.

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Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2011 11:51 amPosts: 6025Location: United States of New England

no worries Moon it's always best to err on the side of caution.they know it's for a dog because we picked up the clomipramine once there and then i had to go through the whole thing again with them yesterday because they want to confim DOB to make sure they arent just doling out meds randomly but Willy was a rescue and a former stray and for whatever reason, even though we picked a birthday for him that we use, every place seems to have a different DOB for him. the vet has one, the behavioral vet has another one, CVS had a totally different one.

we think he was born in 2005 and for some reason CVS has 2009 as his birth year and some random date in January. no clue why. so i had to go through it twice with them this weekend. im like "yeah it's for a dog, he was a rescue, i have no idea what you put in there"

he's had 2 small doses so far. the behavioral vet said they start them off super low to monitor for side effects then this particular med i guess you can go to a really high dosage if need be. we had issues with him not eating at a high dose of clomipramine so that is something we have to watch for then also the other things you mentioned.lethargy will be a tough one. on one hand he could stand being more subdued because that is part of his issue, he's always on high alert and never calms down, but obviously we arent looking to drug our dog to make our lives easier. so we'll have to just watch him.the clomipramine was/is actually really helpful it just wasnt enough for his biggest trigger (other dogs) so hopefully the 2 together wil help him adjust and he can start to accept all the training we do.

chiming in because i think we're going to be giving our greyhound maia some trazodone later tonight or tomorrow morning (whenever the storms get here). she's been taking xanax for a few years but it's not really helping much, and we tried xanax (during storms) in conjunction with clomicalm (daily) last year, and i wasn't crazy about her on clomicalm. so this year we heard about trazodone, and asked our vet if we could try it instead of the xanax during storms. she said sure thing.

fingers crossed that it works well for her, because the next three days look to be nothing but thunderstorms. :|

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update in case anyone wonders later for research purposes: trazodone didn't really help maia that much. it took a long time to take effect, so we needed to try to give it 2 hours before a storm (which, har har), and then it kind of took a long time to get out of her system, so she was pretty wobbly on it. even when we got the timing right, it didn't seem to help much better than the dose of xanax we'd been using previously. SO instead we've doubled her dose of xanax during storms, and that definitely seems to be helping. and we're trying a daily (very low) dose of fluoxetine (prozac) instead of clomicalm, to see how that goes.

_________________i'm not around much, but that doesn't mean i don't love you.